UPA deserves to be taught a lesson in polls: Advani

Criticising Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's comment on the attack at the Police Academy in Lahore that New Delhi and Islamabad should jointly fight the menace of terrorism, senior BJP leader L K Advani on Wednesday said the statement showed the Centre's "flawed policy".

"I am shocked at the statement by the prime minister reiterating his earlier stand that India and Pakistan should jointly fight the menace of terrorism," Advani, the prime ministerial candidate of the National Democratic Alliance told media persons in Bhubaneswar.

"It is obvious from the prime minister's statement that the UPA government's policy of fighting terrorism is deeply flawed," the former deputy prime minister said.

This statement, he said, echoed Dr Singh's stand, adopted after his meeting with former Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf in Havana in September 2006 that India and Pakistan should establish a "joint anti-terror mechanism".

"I had questioned the rationale of India joining hands with a country, whose government had refused to fulfil its 2004 commitment to dismantle anti-India terror infrastructure on its territory," Advani said.

Pakistan had created a Frankenstein, which the rulers in Islamabad were unwilling to vanquish because they knew that it could be used in the proxy war against India, Advani said.

Terror attacks in India, including the one on Mumbai on November 26 last year, clearly bore the signature of Pak-based terrorist groups enjoying both overt and covert patronage of Pakistan government agencies, he said.

"That Pakistan itself has been the victim of home-grown terrorist incidents cannot be an argument in favour of an Indo-Pak joint mechanism to fight terrorism," he said.

Another "proof" of the Congress-led UPA government's "flawed" policy towards Pakistan was the prime minister's statement in October 2008 that he wanted to see the border between the two countries "become irrelevant", Advani said.

"A government that has made India insecure deserves to be taught a lesson in elections," he said.